A stereoscopic camera arrangement is an apparatus made of two camera units, assembled in a stereoscopic module. Stereoscopy (also referred to as “stereoscopics” or “3D imaging”) is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis. In other words, it is the impression of depth that is perceived when a scene is viewed with both eyes by someone having normal binocular vision, which is responsible for creating two slightly different images of the scene in the two eyes due to the eyes'/camera's different locations.
Combining 3D information derived from stereoscopic images, and particularly for video streams, requires search and comparison of a large number of pixels to be held for each pair of images, each of which derived from a different image capturing device. For example, in a case of a 2MP sensor operating at 60 fps (frames per second) and generating 16 bpp (bits per pixel), the bit rate would be a 4 MB per frame or over 240 MB per second. This amount of information makes it virtually impossible (particularly for consumer products such as laptops and tablets) to have it processed or even stored for a short while, as to do so would require resources that are usually unavailable in consumer products, given their expected target prices.
Depth calculation under real time conditions typically consumes quite a substantial amount of the processing device's available CPU.
For carrying out depth calculation using rectified stereo images, the depth is calculated by applying the disparity between the two images.
A hardware chip that determines depth from stereoscopic images, generates a set of most likely disparity candidates for each pixel. Obviously, there is a tradeoff between spatial resolution and disparity noise.
Therefore, a new solution is required to enable overcoming this problem, and the present invention seeks to provide such a solution.